There is a vast amount of data available today and data is now being collected and stored at a rate never seen before. Further, through the employment of various systems such as the Open Data Protocol (OData), data is becoming freed from specific applications and formats. As a result, data is becoming freely accessible and integrated into new uses.
However, although data may be accessible, a new user of the data may not know what the data is, let alone how to use it. For example, data created for a specific application may by structured and described based on the application. As a result, a new user of the data may have to spend time and resources parsing the data in order to determine what it is and how to use it. Further, after examining the data, the user may learn that the data is not what he/she wanted or that the data is not appropriate for his/her intended application. In addition, because data may be structured and described in different ways depending on the source of the data, searching for data can result in under inclusive or over inclusive results.
As a result, when a new user works with data, he or she will spend time and energy interpreting the data, making conclusions about the data, and enhancing the data. Thus each time a user employs data for a particular application, the user imparts meaning on the data. For example, the way in which data is used and displayed indicates user conclusions about the data such as what the data is, how it can be displayed, how it is can be read, and associations relationships between the data and other data. In addition, as more and more data is shared between multiple users, data will likely be interpreted, analyzed, and used in different manners depending on the user and the client applications employed to consume the data. These various interpretations and uses of the data provide a rich indication of the meaning of the data. However, although the actual data may be shared, there does not exist a way to capture and share this acquired meaning. In other words, any user interaction with data cannot be shared for interpretation and application in another context. In existing systems, the user changes the data and shares the actual changed data. Therefore, any modification of data is captured for one context of use with a specific application by the actual application.
The above-described deficiencies of today's techniques are merely intended to provide an overview of some of the problems of conventional systems, and are not intended to be exhaustive. Other problems with conventional systems and corresponding benefits of the various non-limiting embodiments described herein may become further apparent upon review of the following description.